Scar Tissue
by wizened cynic
Summary: Grace had scars, but you couldn't see them. (GraceJoanAdam except not really)


**Disclaimer: **Characters belong to Barbara Hall. Mistakes are all mine.

**A/N: **This one was a pain to write and I'm not pleased with the way it turned out, so if you guys can give me feedback and tell me where it went wrong, that would be lovely.

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Grace had scars, but you couldn't see them.

When she was ten months old and just learning to walk, she fell backwards and hit her head on the corner of the coffee table. She got a nasty cut from that, but her hair grew in and nobody could see the scar anymore.

When she was six and a half, she fell off the monkey bars and broke her wrist. The doctor had to put in pins to keep the bone in place, and she got two small scars from that, tiny dents you couldn't see unless you stood up close, and Grace always made sure that nobody stood up close.

When she was eleven, she was cutting out a piece of cardboard with an Xacto knife for a stupid school project, and the knife slipped and she sliced into the palm of her left hand. Her mother was in bed, so Grace wrapped her hand with a kitchen towel and waited for two hours until her dad came home and took her to the ER. Her mom cried the next day, when she changed Grace's bandages. Grace got her stitches taken out the week after, and the scar was so small that it eventually disappeared without her knowing.

Nobody saw these scars, so it was all right; it was like they weren't real. Except Grace always knew they were there, and she hated them. She hated that she had no control over them, and she hated that they stayed with her.

Adam was the only one who saw those scars, and he said they were beautiful. He said they made her Grace.

Adam had scars, and you could see them if you looked closely enough.

He had a tiny smile of a scar near his eyebrow. Grace put it there. When they were about three years old, they got in a fight over a dump truck. Grace made a grab for his eye, and her fingernail dug so deep into the skin that she left a mark.

Joan Girardi noticed it during class one day and asked what happened. Adam didn't answer, just ran his finger over the scar and smiled at Grace, who tried not to smile back.

Neither of them could recall the actual dump truck incident, but they both liked the story, and they both liked the scar. It was something they shared forever, something that nobody could take away, even after they stopped making paper boats and going down to the sewers. It was a testimonial to grape popsicles in the summer, tree forts in Grace's yard, and later, when they were older and discovered more comfort in silence than in words, visits to Adam's shed, during which Grace simply sat and watched him make his art.

Adam created and Grace destroyed. They were perfectly balanced.

Until Joan Girardi came along.

It wasn't like Grace was jealous of Joan Girardi. Because it wasn't like that at all. Because you had to be as dense as plutonium not to realize that Joan and Adam were meant for each other in the most disgusting way possible. Those two were going to be one of those couples who met in high school, married out of college, proceeded to create five billion babies (thus contributing to the overpopulation problem on this planet) and lived happily ever after.

Grace got that.

So Grace assumed that the whole Iris thing is just something that came out of nowhere, only to add melodramatic teenage angst to the already insipid rituals of high school romance, because everybody in the post- _Dawson's Creek_ era demanded teenage angst of some sort. Teenage angst and sarcastic banter --- it was a freaking disease.

If she cared at all, she would have found it amusing how Joan never failed to come up with new ways of trashing Iris. But after a while it was just torturous --- Joan was sulking, Adam was sulking, and on top of that, Grace now had to listen to Iris's annoying squeak on a regular basis.

She was spending too much time with Joan, now that Adam was off cultivating his ill-fated romance with Squeaky, and _that_ itself was torture, because Joan was such a _girl_. Girl in the sense that usually made Grace vomit, but once Grace got past the hair and the annoying way Joan puts on more lip balm every fifteen minutes and the tendency towards considering _People_ magazine as sophisticated journalism, Joan was somewhat of a person of substance, and Grace could deal with that.

Grace could even deal with the fact that they had been sitting in Joan's kitchen for three hours, and they had only finished two of the questions Lischak assigned for homework. Joan spent most of the time bemoaning about Adam and Iris and how she needed some new nail polish, and Grace was beginning to look around for sharp objects, or maybe even Geek Boy, so that she could copy his answers.

What Grace couldn't deal with was that Joan started playing with her hair and now her hair was getting in Grace's face. It smelled like peaches, and it was driving her insane.

Girardi, she said, Get your hair out of my face.

Then Joan started whining about being too lazy to put her hair up, so could Grace braid it for her?

Grace said, Braid your own stupid hair, Girardi. Besides, did Joan actually think she knew how to braid hair?

Joan did her sulking thing and then her pouting thing, and during some momentary lapse in judgment, Grace got out of her chair and walked behind Joan and began twisting Joan's hair into a braid.

_Very bad idea_, because Joan's hair was soft and silky in Grace's hands, and a strange feeling came over Grace, settling in the pit of her stomach, like the time in fifth grade when Connor Evans saw her in the school yard waiting for her mom to pick her up, and he held her hand and split half an Aero bar with her. Her mother never showed up, but her dad arrived a few hours later, and Connor Evans moved to Seattle the following year.

When Grace finished the braid, she saw that Joan had a scar on a back of her neck, a marred patch of skin that she had never noticed before. She wanted to put her hand on Joan's shoulder and run her thumb over that scar, but she resisted the urge, because it would lead to talking.

Talking perhaps about how Joan got that scar, and maybe Joan would ask Grace if she had scars, and Grace would not know how to answer her. There was a part of her so scared that Joan might want to know, want to see them, and there was another part of her that wanted Joan to know and see. Because Joan would fix them --- Joan was good at fixing things, even when they had been broken forever.

This sense of fear and want made Grace ill, so she just let the braid go, and Joan laughed, shaking out her hair like they did in those shampoo commercials which completely encouraged the oppressive standards of beauty that society imposed on women.

Mrs. Girardi came down and asked if they wanted cookies, and then Luke came down and said that they only wanted answers. Mrs. G. went to make the cookies while Luke and Joan bickered over Chemistry, and Grace decided that she had been Girardi-ed out for the evening and left with a dismissive wave.

She went to Adam's shed, where he was welding something onto something that used to be part of a car. It was weird and beautiful, and difficult to understand, like Adam himself. She sat and watched him work, and she didn't know how much time passed before she almost said, Rove, just dump Iris, okay? She's not going to make you happy.

Grace knew only Joan Girardi could make Adam happy, and she wanted him to be happy, because when he was happy, he reminded Grace of the little boy she used to know, the one with whom she made endless fleets of paper boats and filled up the bathtub so the paper boats could set sail. He reminded her of how they used to believe that it was possible to make a paper boat that didn't sink, and Adam deserved to have that belief again.

But words are weak and they didn't come. Instead Grace thought about Joan's hair, the way it smelled like peach shampoo and the perfect scar that hid behind it. She thought about Joan's fingers, how they were long and smooth, perfect piano hands, and she thought about that weird feeling which was nice, except it was also new and strange and kind of scary, because it held some power over her.

Grace watched in silence as Adam made his art, and she knew they were both thinking about the same person, but nobody knew Grace had these thoughts, these feelings, just like nobody knew about Grace's scars, so she was safe, because it was like they never existed at all.


End file.
